Settling into Paris

Settling into Paris

Settling into Paris

Settling into Paris

Settling into Paris

Settling into Paris

In April 1904, Picasso returned to Paris, to the dilapidated
maze of cheap artists' studios in the building called the Bateau-Lavoir ("Laundry
Boat"). This was the end of his shuttling between Spain and Paris;
he had made his decision. He remained in his Blue Period for a
little longer, but, as Gertrude Stein later wrote, "Staying longer in
France this time, he was seduced by French gaiety, he painted in pink
and called this his Pink Period...In actual fact, there was also some
blue in this period, but the characteristics were pink rather than
blue." A piece from 1905, "Harlequin's Family with an Ape," shows
him in transition. His subjects were often circus people, especially
harlequins.

Picasso began making all the right connections. In autumn, 1904,
he met Guillaume Apollinaire and, beginning a celebrated career
as a womanizer, he struck up an affair with Fernande Olivier. As
she described him later, during this time "[t]here was nothing very
seductive about him when you didn't really know him; nevertheless,
his strange insistent look demanded your attention. You could
not quite situate him socially, but this radiance, this inner fire that
you felt in him gave off a kind of magnetism." He also met the
brother-and-sister pair Leo and Gertrude Stein, who became two
of Picasso's most important patrons.

The Steins also supported Henri Matisse, who, with his
fellow Fauvists, shocked the public at their debut at the Salon
d'Automne of 1905 with their seductively bright and free colors
and willfully crude technique. The Fauvists were never an organized
movement with manifestos and programs; as one Fauvist said, "One
can talk about the Impressionist school, because they held certain
principles. For us there was nothing like that; we merely thought
their colors were a bit dull." While the Fauvist experiment had
no direct impact on Picasso's work, its vision of the artist as
wild–the French word "fauve" means "wild beast"–resonated with
him. The cheerful savagery of the paint's application in a piece
like Matisse's "The Open Window, Collioure," suggested a kind of
liberation of vision by an artist gone willfully wild.

The same Salon d'Automne included a room dedicated to
Paul Cézanne, to whose work Picasso's line of thought over the
next few years was most directly indebted. In his development
of Cubism, Picasso would extend a chain of questions that Cézanne
had begun. At this point, Cézanne was nearing the end of his career;
he would die the next year. His achievement, which Picasso studied
and absorbed, was to break down the system of pictorial space that
had developed in the Renaissance and dominated European painting ever
since. In the Renaissance, artists invented the mathematical system
of one-point perspective, a precise model for organizing and rendering
space so as to make the flat surface of the painting appear three-dimensional.
The ideal was for a painting to seem to be a window, looking out
onto a section of reality. But Cézanne and other French painters
towards the end of the nineteenth century wanted to remember that
a painting is a painting, not a window. In a statement that became
one of the great slogans of modernist painting, an 1890 manifesto
articulated: "a picture–before being a warhorse, a nude woman,
or some sort of anecdote–is essentially a surface covered with
colors arranged in a certain order." Instead of trying to conjure
the illusion of three dimensions, avant-garde paintings began to
try to remind the viewer of their own flatness.

Cézanne in particular wanted to paint the process, rather
than the result, of vision. His gaze was questioning; when he
painted, each flicker, shift, and hesitation of the eye was captured,
rather than the schematics of an immediately unified and stable
view. Multiple angles of the same object are present at once;
the eye moves around, instead of being perfectly fixed as implied
by one- point perspective. The impact of photography on painting
is important in understanding why painters began, at this time,
to strive to get away from illusionistic depictions of reality:
when photography first became popular, in the 1840s and '50s, many
predicted that it would put all the painters out of work; the prediction
proved false–photography did not render painters redundant–but
the new media did force painters to redefine the
purpose of painting. Now that a mechanical device had usurped
the task of making copies of objective reality, of making "realistic"
and exact portraits and landscapes, painters surrendered this territory,
exploring instead a subjective vision. Illusion could no longer
be their goal.